This dissertation investigates how changing management strategies in the public sector contribute to shaping and developing the ‘parking attendant’ as a certain sort of person in a municipal centre responsible for parking attendance. The job as parking attendant is – just as many other jobs in the public sector – the object of changing management strategies according to changing political agendas. Meanwhile, the job is also a psychologically demanding and stigmatized unskilled job in the public sector. The dissertation analyzes how parking attendants, whose job is increasingly professionalized, interact with changing management strategies by for instance resisting or avoiding them. The dissertation relies on sociological fieldwork among parking attendants and their managers. The fieldwork included shadowings of daily work, interviews, gathering of documents and participant observation at job-interviews. The analytical point of departure for the dissertation is Ian Hacking and Paul du Gay’s theories of how identities are ‘made up’. This sort of analysis is coupled in three articles in the dissertation to other perspectives on the relation between work and identity. These are about how employees handle stigma, which is considered in research on ”Dirty Work”, about how managers and employees draw upon ”aesthetic labour” to meet the public’s scepticism and as a means to bring down the number of assaults and finally how managememt strategies aiming at creating inclusion and diversity contribute to the making up of the parking attendant. All three analysis contribute to expand our understanding of work and identity in the public sector.

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This paper presents stories from fieldwork among parking patrol officers and
managers in a Danish municipal centre. The stories are about the hiring, firing and
retention of parking officers. The centre is renowned for management’s active and
ambitious work to improve the work environment for parking patrol officers, the
quality of parking services and to employ diversity management. As many other
types of unskilled work in Denmark, the job as parking patrol officer is a possible
entry point to the labour market for people without formal education or people who
have been worn out in other occupations.
By presenting stories told by parking patrol officers and their managers at Centre
for Parking, I wish to contribute to our understanding of the role of the public
sector as an employer: the ambitions and limits of the public sector in regard to
employing people for unskilled work and the dilemmas that follow. The aim of the
paper is to show how these stories shape the simultaneous processes of
professionalizing the traditionally unskilled work of parking patrolling and
fulfilling a role as a socially inclusive workplace.

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This paper is about the work and management of parking patrol officers in a Danish municipal department responsible for parking law enforcement. The job as a parking officer is un-skilled and fairly light in terms of physical demands, but quite demanding in terms of contact and coping with disgruntled car-drivers. In recent years the municipality has developed a strict policy in regard to parking, increasing both the enforcement of parking rules and the prices for parking. Alongside this development, the municipal department has become renowned for management’s active and ambitious work to improve the working environment for parking officers, and to employ diversity management.
Regarding parking officers as street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 2010), the paper addresses the characteristics of their work and the challenges posed to the individual employee and manager. Becoming a parking officer is not only a matter of being able to cope with people on the street, but also being able to cope with colleagues and managements’ particular expectations to your personality. Since the department of parking is part of a public organisation these expectations become all the more complicated (Hoggett 1996). They rely not only on the revenue from parking tickets and organizational credibility, but also on the availability of unskilled work for job-seekers and integration and retention efforts in staff-management.